28 Feb 2009
Legendary broadcaster Paul Harvey dies

And now he knows the rest of the story ... RIP.

"Paul Harvey was one of the most gifted and beloved broadcasters in our nation's history," ABC Radio Networks President Jim Robinson said in a written statement. "As he delivered the news each day with his own unique style and commentary, his voice became a trusted friend in American households."

(link) [CNN.com]

22:49 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

What's Eating Our Kids?

Ok, now I'm terrified, too.

Sodium — that’s what worries Greye Dunn. He thinks about calories, too, and whether he’s getting enough vitamins. But it’s the sodium that really scares him.“Sodium makes your heart beat faster, so it can create something really serious,” said Greye, who is 8 years old...

(link) [New York Times]

14:55 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

The Recession Gets Personal

Well, I can't act too surprised, I suppose, because I've seen it coming for quite a while. But I can still be shocked, and I was (and still am). I got a 10% pay cut yesterday - as did everybody in the company. Instead of a layoff. Not that it really matters much: every company I've worked for that's mandated salary reductions across the board has closed up shop in less than 6 months. So, based on history, I'm not holding out much hope.

But that's pretty irrelevant. My new salary will not be enough to pay the bills and still eat or buy gasoline. I'll be short a couple of hundred dollars a month. About the only thing left to cut is the cell phone, but that's pretty much de rigeur when job hunting. Which I'll most likely be doing. And, of course, thanks to AT&T's contract policies, it'd cost me a couple of hundred to kill it now.

Being the holder of a 10.75% mortgage is what's really killing me. As I've noted on here before, the bank has no interest in restructuring or renegotiating the note: they can't, as it's been securitized. And they're covered by TARP money anywhay, should I default.

Yet somehow, according to bozo's like this, I'm a deadbeat and thief for daring to hope that the government may step in and try to at least alleviate the problems they've caused. It especially disturbs me that Santelli, as a former trader in so called "derivatives", shows such an utter and complete cluelessness as to defy belief. Either that, or he's actually an outright evil force. At this point, I honestly don't know.

The government for years pushed "free trade" agreements that only worked in one direction, gave companies tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas, and expanded programs to bring in "guest workers", driving down my salary. They invented whole new classes of securities, slicing and dicing common law alongside mortgages. They pass tax breaks and subsidies for larger farmers and stick me with regulations and paperwork. I've been outsourced, downsized, inspected, subprimed and now I'm taking a pay cut. I produce twice as much for half the pay as I did 20 years ago, but somehow, because I tried to play the game and stay afloat, borrowing money at ever increasing rates and with ever more restrictions, to do so, our economic meltdown is all my fault. And now that the government's talking about reversing some of that, the folks who grew rich and fat off buying and selling such government favors and largess have the nerve to call me a deadbeat.

Worse, they're doing their damnedest to convince folks whom they've not yet directly screwed over that I'm the enemy, that somehow I'm responsible for the housing bubble and the current depression. In their world I suppose I should've recognized that I was throughly beaten five years ago and moved into a refrigerator box under a bridge.

I'm so disappointed and burnt by the so called "libertarians" and "free market defenders" running amok on the web that I could puke. Most of them wouldn't know a free market if it ran them down in the middle of the road. They're naught but shills for the corporate state, whose real ideological godfather is not Ayn Rand but Benito Mussolini. The only thing the modern conservative movement wants to conserve is their own wealth and gated communities, and to Hel with everyone and everything else.

A prime example of this is their current defense of the "sanctity of contracts" regarding bankruptcy judges being allowed to modify mortgages. But I've not heard of word of complaint from them when a bankruptcy judge modifies a union contract. No cry of outrage when a credit card company changes terms on it's customers, imposing a higher interest rate in the middle of a contract. Apparently contracts are only sacred when changing them would benefit consumers - if the benefit flows to business, all bets are off and they can be desanctified willy-nilly.

I have no clue what I'm going to do. Try my best to fight off foreclosure by whatever means necessary, I suppose. Will I succeed? Only time will tell. But the next person that calls me an irresponsible deadbeat is liable to get punched in the nose.

14:50 /Home | 2 comments | permanent link

27 Feb 2009
Jindal's volcano remark has some fuming

I confess that my first thought when he uttered that particular inanity was "Gosh, Bobby, why don't we just get rid of that whole National Hurricane Center? Instead of watching storms in the Atlantic, we should be watching spending storms in Washington!"

These people are losing it so badly that I actually had a friend retell an old lawyer joke the other day with Republicans as the butt: How can you tell if a Republican's lying? His lips are moving...

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal took a swipe at federal spending to monitor volcanoes in the GOP response to President Obama's address to Congress. That has the mayor of one city in the shadow of Mount St. Helens fuming. "Does the governor have a volcano in his backyard?" the mayor of Vancouver, Washington, said. "We have one that's very active."

(link) [CNN.com]

06:47 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

26 Feb 2009
Prehistoric global cooling caused by CO2, research finds

The intriguing bit for me in this was the system used to run the simulations: Purdue Pete, a 664 CPU Linux cluster.

A paper published this week in the journal Science, a team of researchers found evidence of widespread cooling that triggered glaciers to form at the South Pole. Additional computer modeling suggests the cooling was caused by a reduction of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

19:45 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Mule skinners need background checks, too

I've heard of lots of stupid government policies over the years: this one has to take the cake! I can only imagine what a mule skinners idea of a "dirty bomb" might be ...

A federal anti-terror law that requires longshoremen, truckers and others to submit to criminal background checks has ensnared another class of transportation worker -- mule drivers.

(link) [CNN.com]

19:43 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

25 Feb 2009
Blackies Go Visiting

My good friend Kevyn came over last evening and loaded three of our Blackie (Scottish Blackface) ewes in a band spanking new stock trailer. They're headed for Connor Prairie for the summer, and will be bred (late, for sure) to a Horned Dorset ram they have over there. They were a bit skittish, but it only took about half and hour to get them loaded and gone. They'll be back in October with lambs in tow - the lambs are my price for the use of them over the summer, and we'll be heading over at shearing time to help with them and others. All in all, a pretty good deal for us.

Connor Prairie is selling the red stock trailer I sold them two years ago - wish I had some extra cash to buy it back, but, alas! no such luck. The new trailer Kevyn had was something else: the gates locked back with push plates, so opening and snapping them shut was easily done with an elbow or a shoulder - much easier than struggling with pin latches in older trailers. A simple innovation, but one that makes a lot of sense.

07:59 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Biologist discusses sacred nature of sustainability

Environmental concerns fit pretty neatly within the context of all Earth-based religions: it's the revealed religions that seem to have some difficulty with the idea. And the simple reason for that is that the revelations took place many hundreds of years ago, under different circumstances and conditions, yet they're supposed to be eternally relevant because "god" said it...

This is one theological thorn bush that heathenry lacks, and that's a good thing, because we have more than enough other bushes to trim.

The hot topics of global warming and environmental sustainability are concerns that fit neatly within the precepts of religious naturalism, according to Ursula Goodenough, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to being a renowned cell biologist, Goodenough is a religious naturalist and the author of The Sacred Depths of Nature, a bestselling book on religious naturalism that was published in 1998.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

07:44 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link

Court Upholds AP For 'quasi-property'

Unbelievable. What the Hel is "quasi-property"? Isn't that like being "quasi-pregnant"? You cannot own facts - oh, wait, of course you can, since we began allowing patents on math, genetics and software.

I guess even this humble blog had best watch what I link to to going forward. Because the slippery slope some of us have been railing about for years just got a good greasing.

A federal court ruled that the AP can sue competitors for 'quasi-property' rights on hot news, as well as for copyright infringement and several other claims. The so-called 'hot news' doctrine was created by a judge 90 years ago in another case, where the AP sued a competitor for copying wartime reporting and bribing its employees to send them a copy of unreleased news. The courts' solution was to make hot news a form of 'quasi-property' distinct from copyright, in part because facts cannot be copyrighted. But now the AP is making use of the precedent again, going after AHN which competes with the AP, alleging that they're somehow copying the AP's news. The AP has been rather busy with lawsuits lately, so even though the AP has a story about their own lawsuit, we won't link to it.

(link) [Slashdot]

07:39 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

24 Feb 2009
Contrasting faith

Encouraging? Perhaps. Time will tell. But in any case, it's worth remembering that's there's more than two types of Islam, just as there are more than two kinds of Christianity and so many heathen/pagan variants I've lost count. The world is not nearly as monolithic as it sometimes appears.

Can Sufi Islam counter the Taleban?

(link) [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

07:45 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

AP Considers Making Content Require Payment

Hey! If your competitors won't shoot you in the head, do it yourself!

TechDirt is reporting that the Associated Press is poised to be the next in a long line of news organizations to completely bungle their online distribution methods by making their content require payment. While this wouldn't happen for a while due to deals with others, like Google, to distribute AP content for free, even considering this is a massive step in the wrong direction. "Also, I know we point this out every time some clueless news exec claims that users need to pay, but it's worth mentioning again: nowhere do they discuss why people should want to pay. Nowhere do they explain what extra value they're adding that will make people pay. Instead, they think that if they put up a paywall, people will magically pay -- even though the paywall itself is what takes away much of the value by making it harder for people to do what they want with the news: to spread it, to comment on it, to participate in the story. Until newspaper execs figure this out, they're only going to keep making things worse."

(link) [Slashdot]

07:40 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

23 Feb 2009
Spooks and techies to be vetted for their online networks

As if I needed another reason to avoid "social networks" like the plague they are...

Be careful who your online friends are, as they could well damage your career. That is the slightly chilling warning sent to us this week by a reader who works at a senior level providing IT support on a range of Government projects.

(link) [The Register]

07:08 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Rename Law? No Wisecrack Is Left Behind

A teacher friend of mine calls it "No Child Gets Ahead". With the emphasis being on testing for rudimentary skill sets, there's neither time nor money for things like advanced science, music, art, or literature. And we're gonna feel the results in about 10 years.

Educators, wonks and assorted rabble-rousers are working to rename the No Child Left Behind act.

(link) [New York Times]

07:06 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

22 Feb 2009
Credit Crisis Visualized

There's a wonderful post up over at within the crainium explaining the credit crunch. Check it out - well worth the time (it's about 10 minutes of video).

Included as a bonus was a link to GNMA (GinnieMae), a Federal program for mortgage backed securities that some say started the whole morass back in the 80's. Drilling on this site provided the first prospectus I'd seen offering mortgage backed securities... scary stuff, indeed. Or "Fun With Math", take your pick.

11:05 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

The Fall of the West: The Slow Death of the Roman Superpower

Dare I say it? Sure. Here's a backgrounder for the present crisis.

In AD476 the last emperor of Rome was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by a German general. The deposed emperor was little more than a child, the last and weakest of a series of puppet rulers on the Roman throne. It was a nice irony that his name was Romulus, the same as the legendary founder of the city.

(link) [Times Online (UK)]

10:58 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link